What would our world today look like if the Romans had not won but lost the Punic [1] Wars? Christianity likely still had happend and so our current world might not be all that different…
Any and all new information that can be gleaned from finds like these about the ancient Canaanites that once influenced our Celtic, Iberian, Germanic and Roman ancestors is interesting.
If Rome had lost the Punic Wars, it likely would not have colonized the Levant. Not only would Christianity have spread differently, but the story of Christ would also have been very different.
For instance, there would have been no census to bring Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, there would have been no Pontius Pilate. Crucifixion itself was a favored means of execution in the Roman Empire, and may not have been employed by whatever political entity that would have been dominant in Judea in its stead.
Yes all circumstanced would be different. Impossible to tell how it would have played out. My opinion is that the historical Jesus would not have been born. Christians may think otherwise.
The Bible says in Galatians 4:4, that "when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son." Thus, when Jesus was born and what was going on was not happenstance. The point in history and the circumstances of when it happened (for example, the Romans being in power, and their use of crucifixion on wooden crosses) were foundational to Him accomplishing the work the Father sent Him to complete. He had to be raised up on a tree at His death in order to take the curse of the sin of His people upon Himself.
I mean that's still all historical speculation and using a statement from the Bible as anything other than a statement of the obvious since the Christian mythos require a death and resurrection seems dubious. It's very possible that none of it happened. I mean it seems most likely that there was an individual named Jesus who preached as there were many like him in that period in that era, which can be verified by other historical sources and works. It doesn't seem unlikely that one eventually came to dominate and win the imaginations of people, especially of the poor and oppressed who needed something better was going to happen down the line just to keep going and bring a little happiness to them. Then you have the springboard for a full blow religion. Another way is to conquer vast swathes of land and force people to accept your religion and that seems to be the more tried and true method down through the ages by all of the current major religions.
Non-christians and Christians alike seem to think the existence of multiple stories about a particular person written down after all first parties were dead means a historical Jesus is a certainty. I actually like Christianity and many of the teachings, but for some reason people will accept the worst evidence for this one specific claim.
What's the alternative? This is true of many historical facts we take for granted.
The earliest accounts of Jesus were written only one generation after Jesus's death. Plenty of first-hand accounts were still available. There are many of corroborative accounts of Jesus and other historical accounts of this period.
Christianity had spread to Greece in 50 AD, only 20 years after Jesus's supposed death. In an age where information moved so slowly, it's remarkable that Christianity had spread so quickly.
It's fair to dispute the details of the canonical/apocryphal stories—surely those are contrived—but the idea of Jesus had to come from somewhere. No one else was interested in taking the credit, which should tell us something.
Yes, Mithras, Dionysus, Zarathustra, and other pantheonic cults have quite a bit of similarity to the messianic figure at the center of Christianity as well as its early rites and rituals. Whether Greek, Iranian, Phoenician/Hebraic fusion doesn't really change the convergence that arose as a consequence of the Roman policy on toleration of local cultures.
Mithrasism was a good candidate to replace early Christianity, as they were rival religions. Christianity persecuted Mithrasism starting in the fourth century CE, all but wiping it out.
Information would move quite fast within the Roman empire, especially in the Mediterranean basin. There was a neverending circular movement of goods and people there. Soldiers, mariners, businesspeople, bureaucrats, learned men. Getting from Roman Palestine to Greece by ship was probably faster than getting from Roman Palestine to interior Syria by caravan.
The alternative is that there's no historical character, merely a mythical one. Many of the early stories make much more sense if you adopt that position.
The earliest allegorical story that mentions the character was written around 70 CE - so a good 40 years after the supposed crucifixion.
You assert plenty of first hand accounts were available (they weren't), and that there are many corroborative accounts now (there aren't).
The movement seemed to be spreading remarkably slowly until it was leveraged by an opportunistic emperor in the early 4th century. At that time there were dozens of various sects, the Nicene was just another variant, but the orthodoxy that came out of that adoption meant we lost many of the works and details of the others. That rewriting of history would also address your last point, too.
What present-day meme will reach a similar level of distribution and hazy origins? Will we see future generations speculating about the true nature of Harry Potter, or the Jedi, or Chuck Norris's superpowers, or the one true Nyancat?
I mean, we still have records of Josephus Flavius' (not a Christian and not associated with the early church) writings. He was writing something like 50 to 60 years after the date of Jesus death. However, it should be pointed out he mentioned something like 20 people all called Jesus (in Koine Greek), because it was at the time a relative common soubriquet. No early writers seem to doubt the existence of such a person although they definitely differ on the details.
In short, it's highly unlikely Jesus is purely fictional, and there was almost certainly someone known as Jesus executed by Pontius Pilate. Is this going to make a difference to your beliefs in any direction? No.
Those writings are doing a lot of heavy lifting, since that's about all apologists can hold up as 'contemporary corroboration'.
Antiquities was written in the last decade of the first century, so at the further end of your 50-60y range. As you note, the wording in the Jamesian reference is not very compelling in itself, and historicists generally argue that Josephus would have explained his terminology much more carefully than we see in that section, so there's some reason to doubt it was in the original.
The longer section from that work that apologists refer to is clearly an interpolation. The style is completely wrong for both the author and the context. The previous pages are describing taxes, protests, massacres, etc and then there's this very brief and spectacularly flowery prose that attests to Jesus being the Christ, and to the ten thousand wonders he did, and then on the next page the author continues with 'And another terrible thing that happened to the Jews ...' -- which only makes sense once you remove the clearly forged / added page.
At which point we're really short - a rounding error away from zero - on any corroborating stories from the 1st century.
Independently from being an atheist I’m very dubious about the historic validity of Jesus. Clearly all the supernatural aspects (virgin birth, miracles, & cetera) are to be eliminated as implausible, but even what remains doesn’t strike me as substantiated by historical veracity. Accounts are inconstant and do not gel well with certainties we have about the period (such as Roman censuses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius).
We have very little first hand evidence about almost any historical figure every existing, for oldest surviving written source about the Second Punic war and Hannibal's invasion of Italy was written at least 50 years after it happened. The oldest surviving book about Alexander the Great was written several hundred's of years after his death.
> .. there would have been no census to bring Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem ..
Most historians agree there was no such census, certainly not one that required people return to their birthplace. There was a 6CE census (but it certainly would not have required everyone travel to their origin - that would have been as ridiculous then as it sounds now), plus the timing would put it at odds with Herod's death in 4BCE. In any case, it appears to be a literary device employed by the author of Luke to get the main character of the story to the prophecy-mandated location.
> Christianity likely still had happend and so our current world might not be all that different…
I don‘t know about Christianity. I think that without the conversion of Constantine, Christianity would have at best been something like Baháʼí is today, a relatively small, persecuted religion. It was Constantine’s conversion and the subsequent adoption of Christianity by the Roman Emperors that made Christianity what it is.
Yes, and the thing is that many of the trappings of at least the Catholic church reflect a strong "Romanization" of the religion and the fusion of various "pagan" elements (stylistic and ritualistic) of Roman or Mithraic pagainism into the practice. Vestal virgins to nuns, etc.
Christianity without a powerful pan-Roman culture may have stayed as a kind of messaniac Jewish sect, confined to Jewish communities around the mediteranean.
Perhaps the appeal of Christianity was just happenstance or perhaps it hit a sweet spot that would have worked well even a large empire (with a large number of slaves etc) that would have originated from a Punic civilization and its religion, myths, culture.
It would have likely looked very different from this Christianity, possibly to the point that we'd barely recognize any similarity.
I'm no expert, but think the Coptic sects accepted early Roman orthodoxy, participated in the various councils, adopted the Nicene creed, condemned the various heresies, etc. So they differ extensively from the rather heterogenous beliefs and practices of the church of 1st and 2nd century.
In a way, maybe Islam is closer to what you're suggesting. A monotheistic religion without the dominance of the Roman empire or influence from it, and without the rather odd violent debates about the trinity and the relationship of Christ to God etc. that went on in early Church
The empire created the conditions for a 'pandemic'-style spread of religion in a meme-o-sphere unadapted to such -- and probably any Mediterranean-wide integrated economy would've been similar in that way.
Some features of the winning religion seem convergent (e.g. intolerance to rivals). But I think expecting Christianity in particular would be like expecting a rewind of evolution to end up at humans.
Christianity was not really a small religion in the earliest centuries of the Common Era. It was adopted by the Roman elite relatively quickly, partly because its unique cosmopolitanism and appeal among the lower classes meant it meshed very well with the open-minded Stoic ideals that would've been common back then.
Technological progress didn't really stop when 'ancient' civilizations collapsed. First of all it was hardly happening in the first place, most people were subsistence farmers and their lives hardly changed when the Library of Alexandria burnt down or Christian emperors stopped funding the Academy in Athens.
Also the 'dark ages' weren't really as dark as some might think. Arguably most of the decline was a result of climate change and the plague, which lead to a collapse of urban populations, which were the centers of literacy and education. However technological progress didn't really stop, there were significant improvements in metallurgy and agriculture and by the high middle ages Europeans were much more 'advanced' in almost every area compared to ~400 AD.
The one thing ancient empires were exceptionally good was concentrating resources, e.g. no state was able to field a standing army in the hundreds of thousands and no city even came close to the population Rome had until the 19th century but that was due to political reasons (shipping tons of grain half across the (known) world to fed a massive unproductive urban population just to shore up some political support simply wasn't viable anymore).
Certainly the economic contraction in the west was real and looked very much like a "collapse." But it was as much a product of frequence plagues with corresponding population loss as it was of some more systemic civilizational collapse.
In the east, in Anatolia, the Roman civilization lived on with quite a bit more vibrancy and power than people often recognize.
But in places like Britain it's pretty night and day: early 5th century still a predominantly Christian Roman province speaking Latin and Brythonic, by the end a predominantly Saxon speaking mostly non-Christian population with drastically reduced economic activity and wealth.
So the roads were not paved after the 4th century due to plague and not a failed civilized administration? Would you consider the Merovingians as civilized as the Phoenicians?
I think the story is really one of the failure of the ability to raise taxes for the maintenance of armies and civil infrastructure rather than some inherent "civilized" or "uncivilized" character of any particular people.
You can't raise taxes when half or more of the population is gone. As per WP: "Some historians believe the first plague pandemic was one of the deadliest pandemics in history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 15–100 million people during two centuries of recurrence, a death toll equivalent to 25–60% of Europe's population at the time of the first outbreak"
And this is after a couple generations of political turmoil, other plagues, and invasions.
We know remarkably little about the Phoenicians, though. So it's not really a fair comparison, based on what we do and by modern standards Merovingians would probably be considered to be more civilized.
There is archeological evidence that Saxons and other Germans had started settling in Britain well before the Romans officially left. They had almost successfully invaded Britain back in 367. And many had settled in Britain and seemed to be somewhat integrated into the local society, Germans served in the Roman army, their villages were in close proximity to Roman roads and settlements, indicating that that both groups managed to coexist at least somewhat peacefully of for a time.
Over time Saxons seemed to have displaced the local Romano-British elite. However this process probably took at least several generations and probably had little effect on the lifestyles of most ordinary people. While the disappearance of the Roman legions must had been a shock, the transition from mainly Christian Latin and Brythonic speakers to pagan Saxons was fairly slow and probably took several hundreds of years.
Also we don't really know Christian Britain was before the Saxon conquests, it's not unlikely that most British people outside of urban settlements were still pagan and only superficially Christianized. We also don't really know did the British people become culturally Saxon. According what was written down by the surviving members of the Romano-British elite it was a result of genocidal conquest. However the predominant view of modern historians seems to be that the process was much more peaceful and more akin to the Arabization of the Middle East and North Africa (i.e. the conquerors established a dual class system which incentivized the local population to adopt the Saxon language and culture because of the economic and social advantages. Also, unless the Saxons were significantly more brutal, oppressive and numerous than the Franks, Goths and other invaders this would imply that the local Britons weren't actually thoroughly Christianized since Christian populations were usually able to resist this type of Cultural conversion).
There's a lot here to respond to, and in the end it's mostly speculation, but a few things.
In regards to the comparison between Franks and Goths and Saxons, it's not really the same. In those cases they took over the existing Roman state and continued its administration, leaving the institiutions of civil society much the same and even adopting Latin as a language and Roman cultural practices for themselves within a couple generations.
By the time the Saxons arrived en masse in what is now England the existing Roman administration had pretty much collapsed. That seems to be the archaeological evidence in my recent reading: drastic declines in the economic vibrancy of British communities. Things like amphorae and other mediterannean trade goods vanishing. Rich people burying their wealth to hide it from invaders. And, yeah, the stories told by Gildas & St Patrick, our only real contemporary accounts from this general period, seem to agree with this: decline of local British power, retreating into small cloistered communities, Saxon (and other Germanic) raiders wea continual pest even in Roman times, yes, but after the departure of the Roman administration it becoming drastically more aggrivated, the locals were incapable of defending themselves, and the British turned to Germanic mercenaries as a defense (a common Roman tactic). Which predictably backfired.
I've read two books commenting on this period of British history recently, and both disagree remarkably on the degree of cultural and physical replacement. But on the whole the genetic and archaeological and linguistic evidence seems to me to support the statements by Gildas and St Patrick: the British were on the whole replaced & expelled (to Wales, Cornwall or Brittany), or exterminated. This is reflected in part by the fact that only a few Saxon settlements carried forward on top of existing Romano-British settlements, and most adopted new names entirely. Even some prominent ones like London were left pretty much uninhabited for generations before being re-settled later.
Population replacement seems to had been significant but in no way total, the ancestry of modern the population of eastern England (which was conquered/settled first) is around 40% Anglo-Saxon/Continental Germanic (however the influx of Germans continued well after the 5th century and we can't really genetically distinguish the Saxons/other Germans and the Vikings/Norse whose came centuries later). Of course we don't really know what happened to the local people, many might have fled west or to Armorica, there are some hypothesis that the native Briton population was more heavily hit by the plague and/or that south east England was already significantly depopulated during the 4th century, many were undoubtedly murdered however it seems that the majority (or at least a number exceeding that of the invading Saxons) survived and were integrated into the new Saxon society one way or the other.
There is evidence that there was at least some degree of peaceful coexistence between Saxons and local British at least in the early periods of settlement. There are burial sites where both genetically British and German (or mixed) people were buried together, with identical grave goods and seemingly with no distinction. This would indicate that at least some local people adopted Saxon customs and language and were accepted as equal members of their society. However this is not exactly conclusive, there are also many segregated burial sites so the type of interaction between the local Britons and the German invaders/settlers varied by area and time period, it took them well over 200 years to almost fully conquer the territory of modern England.
Gildas and St Patrick were members of the Romano-British landowning elite which was displaced by the Saxons, I'm trying to dispute their authenticity but their experience might not have been representative of the majority of local people (who were never fully romanized or integrated into the roman society). It would not be completely surprising if local Britons decided that they would be better off by 'switching sides' and adopting Saxon/German culture. Of course we don't know how widespread and voluntary the process could had been, however according to genetic evidence it must have occurred to some extent.
Sometimes I fantasize we'll unearth some long lost documents and get more background on how things were then. For some reason the period fascinates me.
One of the things that undoubtedly went down was the level of literacy. Plenty of secular Roman citizens were literate and there were many schools for young Romans who wished to find lucrative employment.
Once Rome fell, the educational system outside the Church disappeared entirely for almost a millennium and the Church remained the only institution that carried on the tradition of reading and writing in the West.
This must have had some impact on the tempo of overall technological progress. Just like the fact that the successor states, unable to concentrate resources as much, couldn't start big public works (channels, aqueducts) which used to require a lot of highly qualified people.
That's true, the decline in literacy was significant, but this is to large degree an outcome of the collapse of urban populations, even during Roman times there were relatively few literate people in the countryside. And "almost a millennium" is probably stretching it a bit, for example in Tuscany (and presumably other regions of Northern/Central Italy) most small towns or even villagers seemed to already have teachers by the 12th century and in richer cities like Florence at least the majority of boys attended a primary at least for some time (by the 14th century it's estimated that up to 30-35% of the people living in Florence could read, of course being one the richest and most developed cities in Western Europe this was probably an outlier, but then again even during the Roman times literacy probably varied significantly between Italy, the Greek cities in the east and places like Gaul or Britain).
Well there was a collapse, but it "only" lasted for 100 to 200 years and no anything close to 600. Populations in Mediterranean and European decreased sharply between 5th and 6th centuries due to the plague and climate change and growth remained modest until the medieval warm period. However there was nothing the people living at the time could have realistically done to avoid this.
However outside of that period it's not that straightforward. The Roman economy was stagnant or declining well before the Western empire officially collapsed. According to some historians growth in much of the Mediterranean region stopped with the Roman conquests at the end of the Hellenistic period. But even if we assume that ~200 A.D. was the peak can we really say that there was more technological innovation and economic growth between the 3rd - 5th centuries than between the 8th and 10th centuries? Probably the latter..
And it also varied significantly depending on the area we're talking about. Italy probably took the longest to recover but it's economy was massively inflated due to wealth transfers during the Roman period. However the center of economic and political power in Europe has shifted to the other side of the alps France and Germany had nearly the double the population in 1000 AD compared to their Roman peaks. And some places like mainland Greece arguably never did until the 19th century (it was probably was past it's peak during the Roman period as well, though. A similar process occurred in the eastern Mediterranean where the center of power shifted from the coast to the inland areas (like the area modern day Iraq).
And we're only taking about absolute growth here, per capita productivity probably wasn't as much affected and most of the decline in international trade (which eventually recovered) was balanced out by higher availability of land (per capita) and improvements in agricultural techniques and tools.
If we're talking about technological growth, well again in some areas like architecture the decline was severe and near total (most communities couldn't afford to maintain the buildings they already had). In other areas the reverse might had happened, based on archeological evidence the average quality of metal tools and weapons in Western Europe was already much better in the 7-8th centuries compared to what the Romans ever had. The heavy plow was introduced in agriculture, water mills continued to be built. Literacy rates fell, however that was to a large degree an outcome of the collapse of urban populations. However the link between economic and technological progress and education in the ancient world wasn't all that clear.
Uncollapsed civilizations aren’t necessarily sources of progress. Stability can lead to stagnation. A more reliable driver of innovation towards modernity is war. Perhaps if the ancient Roman state had had a strong persistent competitor in the form of a resilient Carthage, they would have spurred each other on to make more rapid progress.
Civilizations have to collapse for progress. Civilizations always stagnate. Otherwise, the mesopotamians, ancient egyptians, ancient chinese, ancient indians, etc would have given us smartphones. If it is civilizations' nature to continually progress, the aztecs or incas or mayans in the americas would have had space ships by the time columbus arrived to exterminate them.
I love alt historical thinking. What would have been the big shifts in the tech tree? Literacy to moveable type would have done wonders. And coal. And banking. I think that would have been enough. Monotheism was a disaster for intellectual development.
China, a polytheistic/non-theistic culture in those times, being the progenitor of many fundamental technologies, even while ultimately failing to propagate many of those technologies, is a good example.
If the intelligentsia are focused on climbing fruitless political ladders steeped in theology versus scientific endeavors, you have less progress overall.
Yeah that's seems silly, all religions tend to stunt scientific growth as they keep large swathes of people from being curious about why certain things happen and just "why?" in general.
Yeah, but polytheistic approaches at least allow for diversity of thought. Like the hermetic philosophies that influenced alchemy. Monotheism (the enforced kind) really stunted philosophy.
Religion provided a rules based framework on how the world works, it might have been absurd (from a modern viewpoint) and has largely outgrown it's purpose but humanity had to start somewhere and it's hard to imagine modern scientific method could had been developed without the foundation by built medieval theologians.
Phoenicians wouldn't have gone so far inland. Carthaginians were their descendants, but at the time of Second Punic War, centuries had passed since original colonies like Tarsis or Malaka (Cádiz, Málaga) were founded.
Carthage was a Phoenician colony itself so it makes (some) sense to drop Phoenicians' name in the mix, but I'd never seen "Phoenician-Carthaginian", simply "Carthaginian" for that era.
Phoenicians had massive involvement in Spanish metal trade, with the mining taking place inland. Of all places this is the one where you can expect them to be inland.
I spent my childhood and teenage years in Cordoba.
This is Tuesday there.
The only reason they don’t unearth Phoenician ruins there is because of the Arabic ruins they find first. And the Roman ones they would find if they kept digging.
What makes me a bit sad is how little we know of people who lived mere 3.000 years before us. Even in human history that's just a flash.
Capture the day and don't worry about what others think. No one will know about it 100 years anyway.
Any and all new information that can be gleaned from finds like these about the ancient Canaanites that once influenced our Celtic, Iberian, Germanic and Roman ancestors is interesting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars